


Sgetti and Chinese Takaway

by TheCreatorOfTales



Series: Adventures with Penny [1]
Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: ALL THE FLUFF, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Fluff, Freakytits - Freeform, Its some soft stuff, Joan is a good godmother and hates Peppa pig, No Angst, Penny just likes Vera, Season 2, So soft and domestic, Vera thinks that Joan with a child is adorable, feel good fic, it was bumbling around in my head and i thought it needed to be thrown out into the world, penny is a matchmaker, you know we love that stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:27:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28799823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCreatorOfTales/pseuds/TheCreatorOfTales
Summary: Vera always enjoys being invited to Joan's apartment for dinner but she's pretty sure that the last time she was here, Joan didn't have a toddler bouncing about the place.Some really soft stuff that's been blocking up my head and needed to be put on paper to leave some space for my other stories to grow.Think of it as a feel good kind of fic. There's cuteness, no angst.
Relationships: Vera Bennett/Joan Ferguson
Series: Adventures with Penny [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2147856
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	Sgetti and Chinese Takaway

Joan is different when she yanks open the door tonight.

Slightly out of breath, she’s got a wet patch on her shoulder and her usually pristine hair is slightly disheveled. And she looks absolutely mortified.

“Vera! I’m sorry, I forgot we had plans tonight.”

Vera just looks at her in shock, she’s never seen Joan so out of sorts. She grips her handbag closer and looks at her in concern. They’d planned this get together earlier in the week, as a way to destress after a few very intense days at Wentworth.

“Are you alright, its not like you to forget anything!”

“I’m fine, honestly, something unexpected came up that made me forget all about it.”

As she’s speaking, Vera spots movement over Joan’s shoulder, and watches as a little girl, who could only be almost two years old, comes toddling from down the hallway, a plastic spoon in one hand, and dressed in adorable pink leggings and a white top with a rainbow on it. She makes her way down the hallway, towards the two women at the front door, a big grin on her face.

Reaching Joan, she clutches at the woman’s leg, hiding her face behind it as Vera smiles at her. She’s tiny, and half hidden behind Joan’s calf, she stays steady on her feet as she grasps at Joan’s trousers.

“Jo!” comes the muffled squeak of the little girl, who Vera can see now is a redhead, her head full of wispy auburn hair.

“Vera, meet Penelope. I call her Penny.”

“Penny!” The little girl repeats, tugging at Joan’s trousers.

Joan looks down, smiling fondly. “Yes sweetheart, you’re Penny.” She says in a gentle tone, reaching a hand down to ruffle the auburn hair on the little girl’s head. The action is so gentle that Vera can’t help but smile. It’s a side that not many people see of Joan, especially in work, but Vera knows from experience how tender the Governor can be. Her mind casts her back to the time when Fletch had cornered her a bit too closely for comfort, demanding another date which she refused, but he’d stormed away, shoving things out of his way as he went and causing her to flinch and slide down the wall of the empty break room as her breathing quickened to the point of feeling like the air was being sucked out of the room. She hadn’t realised that she was having a panic attack until she’d suddenly seen Joan there, crouched in front of her and lifting her chin with her finger and telling her to match her breathing. It had taken ten minutes, and she’d ended up still sitting against the wall, and Joan had sat next to her on the floor. She’d laid her head on Joan’s shoulder without realising as the Governor had reassured her.

Fletch had been given every shift where Vera wasn’t rostered to work since that incident. She could never confirm it, but she thought that Joan was arranging shifts so that the man didn’t get a chance to corner her again. Either way, she was grateful for the thought, something nobody had ever taken the time to do for her before.

She watches as Joan bends quickly, scooping up the little girl and resting her on her hip. Penny puts her head on Joan’s shoulder but continues to look in curiosity at Vera, sucking on the end of the spoon in her mouth.

“Still up for dinner?” Joan asks, not wanting to force Vera to stay with Penny here too. She’s waving the spoon now, in Vera’s direction as if trying to insist in her own way that she wanted the woman to stay.

“Of course! You’re not getting out of it that easy, Ferguson.” She grins at Joan, then at Penny, who grins right back at her and showing little white teeth, rubbing her nose into Joan’s shirt and then lifting her head up to look at Vera again. Joan steps back to give Vera room to enter through the door, and closes it behind her, locking it with one smooth motion, Penny still on her hip. Together they walk through into the kitchen, a decent open space, with a dining table on one side, usually with space for four but now had a high chair on one end.

Penny is apparently fascinated by Vera, as she keeps trying to perform aerial acrobatics to reach her from her place on Joan’s hip. Vera’s smiling and waggling her fingers at her, making the toddler squirm and grin.

“Jo!” The frustrated little girl looks up to the woman carrying her. “Pease!” Joan grinned at her, and then looked at Vera, raising an eyebrow. If Vera wasn’t comfortable with holding the toddler, Joan wouldn’t force her to.

Vera offers her hands up, and gestures at her in the universal signal for “gimmie the cute baby.” Smirking, Joan willingly hands over Penny, and immediately, the redheaded child winds her little arms around Vera’s neck, and is patting her face. Vera finds herself the recipient of excited babbling, and smiles as she bounces the little girl lightly and then places her on her hip, watching as Joan finishes making dinner for Penny.

“Seeing as I completely forgot about tonight, what do you say to take-away? My treat.” Joan says, spooning the spaghetti and tomato sauce from the saucepan into a little pink bowl that Vera notices matches the spoon that Penny has a death grip on.

“Hey, Penny.” She says, coming over with the bowl, catching the little girl’s attention. “What have I got?” She waggles the bowl lightly, and Penny starts bouncing in Vera’s arms.

“Sgetti!”

“That’s right. And who’s holding you?” Penny turns to Vera with the most adorable confused expression on her face.

“Can you say Vera?” Joan asks, wanting to see if she would. “Vee-ee-ra?” She emphasises each syllable, wondering if the little girl might be able to pick it up.

“Vee!” Penny says with a satisfied tone, clapping her hands together.

“Close enough.” Vera shrugs, and the two women laugh as they walk towards the dining table, Joan placing the bowl on the table to take off the tray to the high chair, Vera settling the little girl in it without a second thought, fastening the tray on the top after clicking the belt on her waist.

“Well, she’s butchered my name, so it’s only fair.”

The two watch the toddler eat for a moment, Joan sighing when they see that Penny has turned the bowl upside down and deliberately spilt the food over the tray.

“Penelope!” She says in warning, and the little girl looks up, looking completely innocently at the two of them. Then she proceeds to eat her spaghetti from the tray with her hands, babbling away as she did so.

They decide on Chinese takeaway in the end, Vera calling and ordering but then having to hold the phone to Joan’s ear as she cleaned the dishes from Penny’s dinner to tell them the address for the delivery. She was up to her elbows in dishwater and the moment had been entertaining.

Penny had happily eaten her pasta in her high chair, sipping from her cup and also throwing sauce behind her onto the wall. Joan had simply shaken her head, sighed a little and ruffled the little girl’s hair. She’s covered in pasta sauce, from her face to her hands and her little tshirt hasn’t managed to escape unscathed. The rainbow is now stained orange from the splotches of sauce.

With practiced ease, Joan gently tugs the tshirt over the toddler’s head, and uses it to wipe the sauce from her face. The shirt would be washed anyway, so it couldn’t make the stain worse. Penny sits there in the high chair in her pink leggings and her pink vest, and apparently thinks that the little bow in the middle of it is fascinating as she tugs on it with curiosity.

Vera keeps her entertained for a moment as Joan grabs what she needs to get the little girl ready for bed. It isn’t a hard task, and Penny finds playing high fives with the woman’s hands a very fun thing to do with the way she keeps smacking her hand into Vera’s open palms. She can hear Joan’s footsteps so she unclips the now clean tray, and moves it onto the counter, unbuckles the belt on the little girl’s waist and Penny is already reaching her little hands up to be picked up.

Vera obliges, and has a head full of auburn hair tickling her neck as Penny nuzzles her head into her shoulder, tucking herself into the space where her neck met her shoulder. Vera rubs a hand up and down her back, as Penny grasps her blouse in one hand.

Joan smiles as she passes behind Vera to grab Penny’s bottle, already filled with milk, ready to be drunk before bed. She gently rubs her hand over the little girl’s hair as she passes and Vera smiles to herself at the action.

It was all very lovely.

And then it was hilarious when they eventually move to the living room where Penny is stubbornly standing, holding the edge of the coffee table, refusing to let Joan take off her socks and change her into her pyjamas.

It’s a standoff.

“Penny, give me your socks, please.”

“No tank you. No.”

“Yes, Penelope.”

“Socks for me.” Vera has to hide her laugh behind a cushion from the sofa as she watches Joan try to keep a straight face at the fact that a toddler is grandstanding over a pair of socks that she wont take off her feet.

“I know that the socks are yours, but it’s time for pyjamas.” Joan has patience, Vera has to admit.

“No thanks.”

Joan looks over at Vera with an exasperated look. “Well, at lease she has manners.”

Penny, seeing that her godmother’s attention is focused elsewhere for a second, quickly scoots around the table and then crouches down, giggling to herself and thinking that they’ll never find her in her hiding spot.

The two women look over to see a ginger tuft of hair sticking up on the other side of the coffee table, and they share an amused look. Quietly, Joan stands, and walks around the table and stands in front of the toddler, who realises that her plan has been rumbled.

“Jo, no pjs.” Penny staggers to her feet, and stumbles forward, stopping when she can grasp at Joan’s trousers to keep her balance. “Pease.”

Joan looks down at her with a fond look, and holding her hands on her hips, she bends slightly so that she can hold out one hand to try and encourage the little girl back to the sofa.

“If you’re a good girl, and let me put your pyjamas on, I’ll let you watch an episode of Peppa before you go to bed.”

_Ah, bribery._ Vera thinks. _The tool in every parent’s arsenal._

“Peppa!”

Joan nods, smiling. “Yes, Peppa.” She waits for the little girl to think about it.

Then, she nods sagely, as if answering a very important question. “Ok, pjs please.”

She grasps her hand around Joan’s fingers, and the woman leads her back to the sofa, where she clambers next to Vera, and tries to pull off her own socks.

With a speed that Vera’s never seen, Joan has the toddler down to her little knickers in under a minute. Soon, Penny is stepping into a nightime pull-up with Joan’s help, so there aren’t any accidents during the night and is lifting her arms for her pyjamas.

“Thankfully, Penny decided that she’d had enough of nappies during the day about a month after her first birthday. Apparently she decided that she wanted to use the toilet like her mothers do.” Joan helps the toddler step into the pyjama trousers and lifts them up to her waist, the little girl tugging the top down and patting Joan’s hands.

“If you don’t mind me asking, where is her mum?” Vera is curious but won’t be offended if Joan won’t answer.

“She has two mothers, but unfortunately, Lucy’s sister was in a car accident, so they’ve gone to Perth for the week to visit and make sure she’s recuperating before coming home. It’s not something to expose a baby to, so I suggested that Penny came to stay with me. She goes to nursery whilst I’m at work, and I pick her up on the way home.” She catches Penny as the toddler decides to jump up and try and land in her lap. “Thankfully, she’s a fairly easy toddler to look after.”

Penny decides that she wants to be sitting in Vera’s lap, and clambers across the sofa to climb into the woman’s lap and leans back as Vera brushes her hand across her hair.

Penny turns to Joan. “Peppa, pease.”

“Alright, I did agree to that.”

Using Netflix, she manages to find the popular cartoon about the annoying adventures of a piglet and her family for Penny to watch, as promised.

When she goes to sit down, Penny looks away from the screen and at her, and shouts ‘No!’ as Joan went to sit in the corner of the sofa whilst Vera and the toddler sat in the other. Joan freezes, eyes flicking from one thing to the other to look for whatever had caused the little girl to shout but then watched as Penny clambered out of Vera’s lap. She stumbled across the sofa, reaching out to where Joan was standing and grasped her hand. With a little tug, Joan understood what she wanted.

“You want me to sit next to you?”

A little head nod, and Joan smiles softly and nods her head. “Alright, come on.”

Holding Penny’s hand as she made her way back to the woman sat at the end of the sofa, Joan waited for her to climb back into Vera’s lap before settling next to her, leaving a small amount of space, and not wanting to make the other woman feel uncomfortable.

Apparently satisfied, Penny leaned back into Vera’s front, and watched her program.

Together, they watched as the little pig in the red dress did something completely random with her family which apparently included going in the car. Joan hated it.

“Is this the best that children’s tv has to offer these days?” She murmurs to Vera, who watches with an odd look on her face and answers her with an ‘mhm.’

Thankfully, each episode is only ten minutes long, and when the ending credits roll up on the screen, Penny turns to her godmother and looks up at her with a pout.

“More? Please?”

“Young lady, that isn’t what we agreed.”

Penny sticks out her bottom lip and clutches at Vera’s leg. “One?”

“No.” Joan remains firm. Whilst she allowed some leeway, she was more than aware that the little girl’s bedtime was nearing.

Finding that she was getting nowhere with the black-haired woman, she turns in Vera’s lap and looks up and finds the woman looking down at her.

“Vee? Peppa, please?”

She shares a look with Joan who is trying not to grin. “No love, your Aunty Jo said only one, didn’t she?”

Penny pouts and slumps over, thumping her forehead into Vera’s chest. Vera laughs a little, and rus the back of Penny’s head as the toddler sighs dramatically. She doesn’t whine, but doesn’t look up for a few moments. Joan reaches over to the coffee table and lifts her bottle, shaking it to get the sound to grab Penny’s attention, which it does.

The toddler’s head snaps over to look at her godmother. “Bed?”

Joan nods. “Clever girl, you want cuddles too?”

Apparently, Peppa is now forgotten, as she grins up at Vera and then scrambles out of her lap, the curly haired woman giving her a helping hand. She toddles into Joan’s lap, where the woman had been waiting with her arms open, the bottle in her right hand. Penny makes herself comfortable, curling into the woman, and she sits back into the sofa cushions, making herself comfortable. She offers the bottle to Penny who takes it and is drinking it as she leans into Joan’s chest, her eyes beginning to droop already.

“How old is she?” Vera asks. The toddler had an adorable personality, and she was very well mannered. It wasn’t lost on Vera how Penny sometimes mis-said some words if she was trying to concentrate on doing something at the same time.

“She’s just over eighteen months.” Keeping her voice low, hoping that the sound of it would help Penny be lulled to sleep. “I’m her godmother.”

“If only all kids were like that, I might be convinced to have one.” Vera says, leaning her hand under her chin.

“I never thought of having any, but she’s enough for me.” Joan turns to look at the woman. “Usually by the time she starts getting grumpy I can hand her back to her mothers.”

They chat about little things as they wait for the little girl to finish her bottle, and Joan can feel by the way Penny is leaning heavily into her that she’s ready for bed.

Penny holds out the now empty bottle, which Joan takes from her and shifts so that she can stand with the little girl in her arms. She rises to her feet, nearly losing her footing with the unexpected weight of a limp child in her arms, and Vera is there, hand on her back to hold her steady. The warmth from her hand feels lovely on her lower back and she turns her head to thank her.

Vera smiles. “Probably easier to put her to bed without a concussion from falling over the coffee table, hm?”

Joan huffs a laugh.

“Vee? Kiss pease.” The small, sleepy request comes from Penny, her face in Joan’s shoulder but she blinks tiredly at the shorter woman and Vera cant resist.

“Alright, seeing as you asked so nicely.” Joan leans forward slightly so Vera can place a gentle kiss on the toddler’s cheek and she gets a faint smell of the older woman’s expensive perfume, and she tries not to show how much she likes it.

“Nighty-night.” Penny mumbles, tucking herself further into Joan’s arms.

“Give me a minute to put her down. If the food arrives, the money is on the table in the hallway.”

Vera watches as Joan walks away, murmuring to the little girl who clutches one hand on the back of Joan’s blouse.

Joan walks into her bedroom, and goes straight to the travel cot set up in the corner, with all of Penny’s creature comforts that she preferred to sleep with. Slowly, she lowers the toddler down and covers her with the blanket, watching as she fidgeted to get comfortable.

“Jo?” Her voice is sleepy, but Joan answers all the same.

“Hm?”

“Vee your friend?”

“Yes, darling she is.” Joan strokes her hair, settling her.

“I like Vee.”

Joan grins and answers her. “Yes, I rather like her too. Now, goodnight.” She leans into the travel cot to place a kiss on the little girl’s forehead.

“Love yooou.” Joan returns her sentiments in a whisper, and the little girl is deeply asleep before she pulls the door closed, but leaves it open slightly in case the toddler cries.

* * *

She doesn’t realise that Vera had heard her small conversation with the toddler through the sound monitor as she was plating up the food. The shorter woman blushes and grins largely to herself as she finishes adding rice to her own plate.

Together, the two women enjoy their food, sharing anecdotes about work as they eat. Eventually, Vera has to leave, the nurse that she’d hired for her mother would be wanting to get home before 11pm so after helping with the dishes, she regretfully has to leave.

The two women hug at the door, and Joan places a shy kiss to her cheek, which Vera happily reciprocates with her own. They grin at each other as Vera walks down the hallway and Joan calls out that she’ll see her in work tomorrow.

Vera raises a hand to the cheek Joan kissed and a large grin takes over her face.

Penny lets out a snore and turns over in her sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and Comment keep me going lovely people! They are always appreciated! <3


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